Elements can, when subjected to certain conditions of shock or pressure acquire new properties. For example: aluminum strips (polished with rouge or cleaned with emery) can be dipped in mercury stored in a few centimeters cube bottle and shaken for exactly 2 minutes therein, then carefully wiped. Then, these strips can be immediately thrown into a vessel full of water. The modified aluminum energetically decomposes water into hydrogen and oxygen while it is thoroughly transformed into alumina. The hydrogen so produced also acquires new properties, including that of making air become a conductor of electricity. Le Bon amply describes how to make altered mercury and altered magnesium and their new electromotive properties. These experiments are illustrated and photographs of their progress in transformation phases are shown. Describes set-up for an experiment of how to work with and see "effluxes produced by particles of dissociated matter" with "sufficient tension to pass through thin plates of non-conducting bodies such as glass and ebonite." "Mr Legge (the translator] has repeated this experiment with a Tesla transformer, surrounded by solid Vaseline. Owing to the elevation of tension thus obtained, he has succeeded in compelling the effluxes to pass through ebonite discs half-centimeter thick, while with the apparatus at my disposal, they will not pass through strips thicker than half-millimeter."

The book deals with dematerialization of matter, dissociation of matter, intra-atomic energy, molecular forces, ether, vortex theory, matter as a particular state of etheric equilibrium, products of dematerialization of matter, dissociation of matter by light, photography of momentary equilibria, ionic fluid and its geometrical forms, variation of mass in case of electric fluid, double generation of crystals, modification of atomic equilibria. Book which the FBI seized during the atomic bomb project in World War II. Gustave Le Bon discovered strange ways to activate matter into a sort of radiation, which he apparently did not differentiate from ordinary nuclear radioactivity. Gives many experiments, including some simple ways to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. [Translated by F. Legge. London: Walter Scott Publishing Co. Ltd., 1907. New York Reprint. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910. 439 p.]